The lack of access to virtually any websites and thus a lack of vital communication make me seriously dislike the government right now. Although, I can't complain; the restrictions have loosened a little since yesterday.
Thursday- We went out to a sushi restaurant on Thursday where yet again they tried to make me eat it. This time round, I was wise enough to refuse. Following this, we went to the cinema. I spotted a westerner who was able to tell us that the green film titles are in Chinese and the red ones are in English. Simple as that! Score.
Friday - I suddenly realised that it was Good Friday around lunchtime. I decided Easter was a very good topic to teach the students and began organising an 'Easter egg' hunt. Easter eggs are fairly hard to come by so the prize was actually a bag of sweets. However, in my own excitement of preparing this lesson, I forgot that the afternoon lessons were 20 minutes early and turned up 20 minutes late. (In my defense, they never warned us that every other Friday or so they change the lesson times, it's not on our timetables and they don't remind us) thus P4B missed out. I was determined to do my treasure hunt and scrapped P3's phonics lesson and took them instead. They loved it. Thankfully Izzie helped out so I only had to control and sprint after 18 kids charging round the school. I repeated it with the additional kindergarten classes on Saturday. The students became very confused and asked if chocolate Easter eggs were real as they didn't get any. You'd think they would be happy with lollipops but no!
We went out for a meal again on Friday during which we were invited to KTV with some of the other teachers. Well how could we refuse? We sang Danny Boy. It was rather fun, especially when we took to shouting out the limited number of Chinese characters that we recognised during the Chinese songs. The Chinese teachers found this hilarious.
Saturday - We were supposed to be going to the safari park on Saturday but the torrential rain put a stop to our plans. We went out to lunch at a pretend Italian place that was more French. On the way we found a wallet in the taxi devoid of anything but cash (including a $1 note). We weren't sure what to do with it at first but eventually we decided that there was no chance of it being returned to its rightful owner and so used it to pay for our food shopping. I finally bought myself a new purse after not having one since the last got stolen. We played in the arcade also and went for another meal that night. It should be an expensive week but Will (Izzie's boyfriend) keeps paying for things. He is thinking in euros so to him everything is stupidly cheap. It's become a sort of competition between the 3 of us; who can pay first?
Sunday - I got up nice and early and headed to Guangzhou. I was going to church! My intention had been an English service which I failed but it was a church at least! I was able to recognise the tune to 2 of the songs and hallelujah and amen are virtually the same. The guy next to me was very helpful and was able to tell me which book the readings were from. They gave everyone a boiled egg on the way out. Must be an Easter thing. One or two people came over to talk to me at the end in broken English which was quite sweet. It won’t be becoming a weekly thing. It would cost 1/5 of my month’s wages just to get there, it is 2 hours of travelling, one way, and it is limited what I can get out of a service I don’t understand! I got a taxi back to the station to meet Izzie and Will but the taxi driver tried to swindle me. He drove me past the station and right round the houses before dropping me off, so I argued with him. In Chinese naturally. I say argued, rather, I repeated the same few sentences over and over and gesticulated wildly. As primitive as this method of communication may appear, I did in fact get my way =) The couple showed up a little late to head off to the safari park so again we altered our plans and went to the zoo which was situated much closer to the station. The zoo was quite enjoyable, although the elephant compound had no elephants and was being used to hang someone’s wet washing. There was also a little circus type thing with dogs and monkeys n\in chains and dressed up. Not cool. We made a swift exit after seeing this. We had made a stop at the goldfish garden by this point. It has a pond where one can pay around 11p per minute and catch oneself some pet goldfish. We named ours Simba, Rajah, Mufasa, Bagheera and Theonethatdidn'tgetawayfromWill. Spot the theme? Unfortunately, since getting them, all but one has died including my own catch Mufasa. Poor things. We bought even more DVD's on the way back (5 Yuan each=35p ish) Our collection is rapidly expanding. Upon our return to Foshan, we headed for dinner at Pizza hut. They laughed at how much we ordered but due to it being rather yummy, we munched our way through 4 starters, 3 pizzas and 3 desserts, 1 jug of an orange E-number concoction, 1 smoothie and 1 hot chocolate. As a result, we were there 1 hour and a half after closing time. They literally came to throw us out. Oopsy
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